Meta started sending layoff notices to employees in Singapore early Tuesday morning, kicking off a global workforce reduction of roughly 8,000 people. The emails arrived at 4 a.m. local time.
The cuts represent about 10% of Meta’s total workforce and are expected to hit engineering and product teams hardest. Staff in the US and Europe were also expected to receive notifications the same day, according to Bloomberg.
The AI trade-off
Meta is planning to spend approximately $135 billion on AI-related capital expenditure this year. That figure equals the company’s total AI spending over the previous three years combined.
Alongside the 8,000 positions being eliminated, the company is also closing around 6,000 open roles that had yet to be filled, bringing the total reduction in planned workforce capacity to approximately 14,000 positions.
A sector-wide pattern
Approximately 49,000 tech workers have been laid off across the industry in 2026, as companies large and small adopt AI-reliant business models. Amazon and Microsoft have made similar adjustments, trimming traditional roles while ramping up AI investment.
Meta reportedly plans to log and track employee interactions with corporate systems to train its AI models, raising concerns internally about data usage and surveillance.
What this means for investors
Committing $135 billion to AI infrastructure in a single year makes Meta one of the largest buyers of semiconductors, networking equipment, and data center capacity on the planet. That has direct implications for companies like Nvidia, which supplies the GPUs powering most large-scale AI training.
The 2022-2023 layoff cycle at Meta, which cut over 20,000 positions, coincided with a surge of talent flowing into decentralized projects. A similar dynamic could play out this time around.
If one of the world’s largest companies is mining its own workforce’s digital activity for AI training data, the argument for decentralized identity and user-controlled data becomes more concrete.
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